Look Who's Here (nonfiction memoir)

Look Who’s Here

Five years ago, I moved to San Francisco to help my sister care for our aging parents, specifically my father, who was suffering from dementia. After he passed, it was time to focus on our eighty-seven-year-old mother. His five-year battle with the debilitating disease had left the three of us feeling defeated and depleted. Helping my mother regain her mental and physical health loomed like hike up a Himalayan peak.

And then something magical happened—the first of many mysterious gifts. Ironically, it was spurred by the COVID pandemic that reared its ugly head in January 2020.

As a high school English teacher, I decided to conduct my classes not my from own tiny flat but from the second bedroom of my mother’s apartment. This way, I could spend time with her between classes and help out around the house.

On my first day of school, we had a light breakfast and then I told her I had to teach a 75-minute class starting at 11 am. At 12:15 pm sharp, she burst into the bedroom with a cream cheese and jelly sandwich and apple slices. The combo had been one of my favorites as a kid. Just as she’d carefully wrapped the items in my brownbag lunch decades earlier, she now served my food a beautiful plate with a twisted orange wedge.

“Eat up,” she said. “You’ve got to have energy for your 2 pm class.”

The following day, my lunch included liverwurst on rye and canned Mandarin oranges, which I’d loved as a child and hadn’t eaten in thirty years. When I finished teaching at 4 p.m., we binged on frosted Windmill cookies and milk—a typical afternoon snack five decades earlier—and watched Shark Tank. She rolled her eyes at the whacky inventions.

My mother’s short-term memory was slowly failing and, sometimes during class, she’d forget I was teaching and yell from the kitchen to ask whether I wanted pickles with my turkey Club sandwich, which got a rise out of my students. Another day, she strayed into my Zoom class with her vacuum cleaner. My seniors found this unintentional intrusion hilarious and, by request, she began appearing occasionally as a special guest. Most often it was to answer inquiries about what I was like in high school (“A gem!” she stated). She also admonished my students to study. After a month, my mother’s appearances had built a tight little community in my class. If the students had had their way, they’d have had her appear at the end of class to impart of word of wisdom or tell a story about my youth. She was beginning to emerge from the darkness which had descended with the advent of her husband’s dementia.

Just as important, my mother and I were reestablishing a bond from long ago that had been built on our absurdist sense of humor. Even as an eight-year-old child, I knew we were cut from the same cloth when I accompanied her to the A&P supermarket and watched her spoof the employees. Unable to find a satisfactory cut of meat, she rang the buzzer for the butcher. When the red-cheeked fellow appeared, she stuck her hand in her coat pocket and said, “Stick’em up.” Neither my siblings nor my father would’ve found that remotely funny, or plucky, but I did. Now, more than fifty years later, my mom and I were renewing a shared sense of humor.

Two years after my father’s death, now in better shape, she moved to a senior living community whose residents were mostly Jewish (though we were not). Yet she was quick to inform her fellow residents that, though her heritage was Italian, her 23andme.com test had revealed she was five percent Ashkenazi.

My sister and I had divvied up the work. She focused on the quotidian tasks of doctor’s appointments and errand-running, while my visits were devoted to fun. In a wonderfully bizarre way, my mother and I switched roles. When I was a child playing outside, I’d frequently drop what I was doing and poke my head into the kitchen to make sure she was still there. Now, she was waiting for me to poke my head into her apartment with the words, Guarda chi gai, Italian dialect which meant, “Look who’s here!”

Once a week, we spent mornings motoring around San Francisco, past the whitecaps of Ocean Beach and down the steep inclines of Telegraph Hill, in search of a new coffee shops, where she always ordered Pound Cake and rated it for the waitress. We spent afternoons browsing the supermarket aisles for new products and nipping up free samples. On weekends we’d scoot off for brunch at a pancake house. We spent hours looking at iPhone photos of her first great grandchild.  

Not all was milk and honey. She missed my father—to whom she’d been married for sixty-six years—terribly. On some days, she feared her money was running low (she has enough cash to last till she’s 114). Some days she’d even ask me to pay for her coffee and cake. On other occasions, when I pulled out my wallet, she slapped my wrist and said, “Put that away, I’m your mother!”

Best of all, over the months and years, her sense of absurdist humor returned. When I arrived to take her to a Good Friday mass, one of the Jewish residents asked what the day was about.

“It’s when Jesus died for our sins,” mom replied, then nodded towards me and added, “Mostly, his.”

My mother turned ninety the day before I left for a new job in Chicago. She was naturally upset but gracious about my need to relocate. I know she’s in my sister’s capable hands. But I also realize that her death may come at any moment, so I call her often and visit a few times a year. She’s at peace, looking forward to seeing my father in the not-too-distant future. As for me, I believe I miss our outings more than she.